Philosopher Michael Sudduth argues that survival hypothesis is not the best explanation of the cases of mental madiumship.Stephen Braude regards M.Sudduth's work as the "first rate".

The only "hopeful" thing for survival hypothesis Sudduth states: "This creates the illusion that the survival hypothesis actuallyexplains something, when what has been shown, at best, is only that non-survivalalternatives do not explain the data. In this way, the explanatory merits of the survivalhypothesis have rested almost entirely on the claim that the data in question are otherwiseinexplicable, rather than proposing something substantial that has definite empiricalconsequences."

M.Sudduth is not materialist(as I understand). He is former Chrisitan who converted to Hinduism.

Once again, I both agree and disagree with Sudduth's arguments. I believe that John Edward uses the methods he describes, i.e. psychically taps the minds of the living in the audience and implies that he is communicating with people who have passed on when he is not. The rest he makes up, i.e. once he has a name attached to a person in the audience, and gone on to 'read' a few childhood events, he passes on a frequently trivial message that 'everything will be alright' or that they are fine or whatever. What he does however cannot be explained purely by non-psi cold reading techniques.

On the other hand, a hypothetical medium friend of mine visiting my hypothetical ghost-haunted apartment from overseas, and visiting the country for the very first time, provided historical information from the ghost from 150 years prior about the neighbourhood that I had no knowledge of. On checking later at the local university library, that my hypothetical friend had no access to whatsoever, with the only copies I could find of the local history, the information turned out to be correct. There is no-one living who could have been in the local area and known about the architecture 150 years previously, for instance.

So Michael Sudduth is working with a limited sample and drawing erroneous conclusions, unfortunately. And what of poltergeist activity, and various psychics who can even be seen on cable TV shows communicating with dead spirits in similar ways to my hypothetical medium friend. This is the classic pseudoscep fallacy of assuming their limited data set must be the entire data set.